Three Comparative Literature professors and three Comparative Literature Ph.D students to collaborate on international translation project!
Department: Comparative Literature
Post Date: May 2, 2019News Details
University of California, Irvine professors Jane O. Newman, professor of comparative literature, and Gabriele Schwab, distinguished professor of comparative literature, will lead a UCI Humanities Commons-initiated collaboration with colleagues from Chile, England, and South Africa on a Global Humanities Institute (GHI) on the “Challenges of Translation,” funded by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and the Mellon Foundation. Comparative Literature Ph.D. students Danah Alfailakawi, Ashley Call, and Anandi Rao will also participate, and distinguished professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o will hold a keynote address.
The GHI will meet for two weeks in Santiago, Chile, in July of 2019, for a series of lectures, panels, performances, and workshops in which the UCI delegation will collaborate with faculty and students from the other partner campuses. UCI’s participation is also supported by the UCI Humanities Commons.
The GHI project, entitled “Translation’s Theoretical Issues, Practical Densities: Violence, Memory, and the Untranslatable,” will study and develop strategies of research, practice, and academic exchange based on a multidimensional and interdisciplinary concept of translation with poetic and theoretical implications. The model of translation will be used to explore and rethink both immediate and long-term questions of ethics, politics, history, and performance across media.
Over the past 30 years, translation studies has emerged as an independent field; broadly defined, translation has become a model for multiple lines of study and research, ranging from literary, philosophical and historical to juridical and psycho-social approaches. Its practical and theoretical implications and impact have been influential in view of the cultural, ethical, and political challenges that accompany vast migrations of people due to warfare and/or political and economic plight.
Newman, Ngugi, and Schwab are pleased to be involved in this project with its international reach. Taking leadership in this kind of collaborative project with partners from two Northern Hemisphere centers from North America and Europe and two Southern Hemisphere centers from South America and Sub-Saharan Africa will internationalize the discussions of and programs for literary translation long established at UCI in the School of Humanities, especially in the initiatives associated with the International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT), of which Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong’o was the founding director and Professor Carrie Noland is the incoming director.
CHCI Global Humanities Institutes are multiyear projects devoted to a research theme, method, practice, or problem in the humanities that would benefit directly from an international, collaborative approach to it. These institutes represent the newest phase in CHCI's ongoing effort to advance international, collaborative research in the humanities.